Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone as a digital research

Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone as a digital research platform:

mining and mediating the semantics of fragmentary textuality

http://digitalzibaldone.net

http://digitalzibaldone.net/

Program overview

• Project rationale • Digital Scholarly Editing/Editions• Document analysis of the Zibaldone and Indexes + exercises• Editorial methods and procedures of the Zibaldone project• Technologies and functions of the Zibaldone platform• Intro to XML-TEI• The TEI encoding of the Zibaldone: examples + exercises• Semantic networks in the Zibaldone, knowledge visualization, and

intro to Gephi visualization tool• Social editing, user research and collaboration• Evaluation and feedback: reflect on the differences in working with

the Zibaldone in its various media formats and representations

210/12/2016Silvia Stoyanova, Zibaldone Digital Research

Platform, University of Macerata

Project contributors

• Dr. Silvia Stoyanova, editor, Princeton University-Trier University • Ben Johnston, developer, Senior Technologist at the McGraw Center for

Teaching and Learning, Princeton University• Dr. Clifford Wulfman, consultant, Digital Humanities Center & Firestone

Library, Princeton University • Emilio Capettini and Stephen Blair -- editorial assistants, PhD students,

Classics, Princeton University • Prof. Christian Wildberg, consultant, Classics, Princeton University • Michael Hanley, Kathleen Galeano, Monica Mendoza --

editorial assistants, undergraduate students, Princeton University • Matthias Schneider, computational processing, Trier University• Mariona Coll Ardanuy, PhD student, computational linguistics, Trier

University• Prof. Caroline Sporleder, computational linguistics, Göttingen University• Francesco Annibali, editorial contributor, University of Macerata-Lettere



Project support

• Volunteer work

• Department of French and Italian, Humanities Resource Center & Firestone Library, Princeton University

• Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Trier University

• Biblioteca Nazionale Napoli: Manoscritti e Rari

• Collegio Matteo Ricci, University of Macerata



Why a *digital* Zibaldone?

Leopardi’s Zibaldone

• fragmented text of considerable length and encyclopedic content

• lacking a discursive order and stylistic form

• modular structure

• relativistic method of composition

• authorial indications for potential semantic orders

discursive impasse

Digital medium’s dimensionality

• flexibility

• connectivity

• immediacy & simultaneity

• relationality

• modification, extension, amplification of data model without losing previous versions



Zibaldone modalities of fragmentariness

Temporality: occasional & provisional

composition

Authorial agency: distributed

multiple suspended

Formal:

marginal additions cross-references

Language

Content

Style



Leopardi’s project for editing the Zibaldone

«Quanto al Dizionario filosofico, le scrissi che io aveva pronti i materiali, com’è vero; ma lo stile ch’è la cosa più faticosa, ci manca affatto, giacché sono gittati sulla carta con parole e frasi appena intelleggibili, se non a me solo. E di più sono sparsi in più migliaia di pagine, contenenti i miei pensieri; e per poterne estrarre quelli che appartenessero a un dato articolo, bisognerebbe che io rileggessi tutte quelle migliaia di pagine, segnassi i pensieri che farebbero al caso, li disponessi, gli ordinassi ec.»

-- Leopardi, lettera all’editore Stella, 13.09.1826



Formal fragmentariness and modularity

• 4525 pages

• 6256 paragraphs

• 3685 date divisions

• 2000+ marginal notes

• 3000+ interlinear additions

• 2400+ cross-references

• 3300+ bibliographic references



Zibaldone cross-references



Indexing the Zibaldonetabulati, ed. Peruzzi (pp.363-503)



Indexing the Zibaldone

“La percezione di una difficile districabilità dei materiali raccolti in tanti

anni, che Indice e polizzine gli rimandavano ingigantita nel vario

intersecarsi e sovrapporsi delle sequenze numeriche, doveva rivelarsi un

ostacolo insormontabile. Forse proprio le polizzine, conservate per poter

essere più facilmente trasferite e ricomposte in sempre nuove

combinazioni, mentre gli consentono quasi di visualizzare l’intelaiatura

dell’una o dell’altra opera progettata, finiscono al tempo stesso bloccarlo,

palesandogli la circolarità dei passi registrati e quindi la contiguità e

l’intreccio degli àmbiti concettuali.”

-- S. Acanfora, “Indice e indicizzazione” (Peruzzi, p.90)



The conceptual power of the mind block to discursive order

Zib.1176-78 (17.06.1821):

“Certi ingegni straordinarissimi che la natura alcune volte ha prodotti quasi per miracolo, sono stati o del tutto o quasi inutili, appunto a cagione della soverchia forza o del loro intelletto o della loro immaginazione, che finiva nel non potersi risolvere in nulla, nè dare alcun frutto determinato. [...] Questi geni straordinari, penetrano in certi misteri, in certe parti della natura così riposte; scuoprono e vedono tante cose, che la stessa copia e profondità delle loro concezioni, ne impedisce la chiarezza tanto riguardo a essi stessi, quanto al comunicarle altrui; ne impedisce l'ordine, insomma vince le loro stesse facoltà, e non è capace, a cagione dell'eccesso, di essere determinata, circoscritta, e ridotta a frutto.”

Zib.3269-70 (28.08.1823):

“...l'uomo d'immaginativa e di sentimento nel tempo del suo entusiasmo [...] vede e guarda le cose come da un luogo alto e superiore a quello in che la mente degli uomini suole ordinariamente consistere. Quindi è che scoprendo in un sol tratto molte più cose ch'egli non è usato di scorgere a un tempo, e d'un sol colpo d'occhio discernendo e mirando una moltitudine di oggetti, ben da lui veduti più volte ciascuno, ma non mai tutti insieme (se non in altre simili congiunture), egli è in grado di scorger con essi i loro rapporti scambievoli, e per la novità di quella moltitudine di oggetti tutti insieme rappresentantisegli, egli è attirato e a considerare, benchè rapidamente, i detti oggetti meglio che per l'innanzi non avea fatto, e ch'egli non suole; e a voler guardare e notare i detti rapporti.”



Digital remediations of the Zibaldone

Digital transcriptions– Project Manuzio @

http://www.liberliber.it/online/autori/autori-l/giacomo-leopardi/“Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura” Ed. De Robertis (1921).

– Zibaldone di pensieri, Eds. W. Binni and E. Ghidetti (1969), trans. ed. Giuseppe Bonghihttp://www.classicitaliani.it/index120.htm

– CNSL: http://www.leopardi.it/home.php

Digital formats• http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Prog

etto:Letteratura/Zibaldone

• CD-ROM (Ballerini-Ceragioli, Zanichelli, 2009) facsimiles of manuscript

shows marginalia

advanced search• by area of text

• names (normalized)

• key words with logical operators (and, or, not, near, followed by) on same page

-- no connection with the indexes

-- no hyperlinks of the cross-references



http://www.liberliber.it/progetti/manuzio/index.php

http://www.liberliber.it/online/autori/autori-l/giacomo-leopardi/

http://www.classicitaliani.it/index120.htm

http://www.leopardi.it/home.php

http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Progetto:Letteratura/Zibaldone

The Zibaldone as Hypertext?“Imagine a text that became nothing but footnotes and marginalia referring to one another”

-- David Kolb, Socrates in the Labyrinth

Mark Hebsgaard (1994)

Zibaldone hypertextuality:- “cross-references embedded in the main text”- “web of references to texts outside the main

text”- “meta-layers outside the main corpus:

hypertextual pathways”

Kimberly Amaral: a guide to hypertext writing“While readers do develop their own methods of moving about a series of documents, the author does create the master plan of a piece. Where the author provides links or doesn't, what content is left in or left out, and the placement or prominence of content (will it be encased in a "main text," or will it be located "outside" the main document in a link?) all contribute to the organization and impact of a piece.”

Marco Riccini (2000)



From HTML to XML

• HTML:– facilitates navigation, but does not chart the sequence

in a meaningful way

– multiplies linearity, but lacks dimensionality

– quick access to contextual and critical material, but does not allow to query and select it

• XML: – query, select and harvest semantic information based

on marked up elements of the text

– explore and visualize their relations



Why a *digital* Zibaldone?

• Zibaldone as hypertext (web 1.0: read-only author)– cross-references– alphabetic thematic index, partial indexes– bibliographic (contextual) networks

• Zibaldone as a social platform (web 2.0: read-write editor)– expand editorial apparatus– record shareable annotations on text from user community– editing and research collaboration, centralization of resources

• Zibaldone as a semantic social web (web. 3.0: evaluate, define, structure data human-computer)– harvest information from cross-references, indexes and collective tagging into a

taxonomy of semantic networks– algorithm for computing semantic relatedness between fragments– visualize relationships among authorial and editorial layers of markup– organization and communication of scholarly research



Extending the Zibaldone paradigm

• the Zibaldone as a personal research archive– origins of hypertext as organization of ideas– note-collecting and organizing applications for scholarly work (Pliny,

Zettelkasten, Synapsen, Tinderbox, etc.)

• the genre of fragmentary research notebooks- Leonardo, Notebooks- Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher- Joubert, Carnets- Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon- Schlegel, Fragments- Coleridge, Notebooks- Benjamin, Passagenwerk- Valéry, Cahiers- Simmel, Wittgenstein, Luhmann



Notebook writers on the discursive process of encyclopedic thought

"It is not possible to define this here for lack of paper, but go to the beginning of the chapter at folio 40 where this is defined," reads one scrawled hyperlink. When you get to folio 40, you have to follow a trail that runs backwards through the twelve preceding pages. "Go to page 59," says another note. "Read page 45," says another. "Here is finished what is lacking three pages before this," says yet another.” –”Bill’s book and Leonardo’s hypertext", Tom Standage (1997)

“One fragment lights up another fragment; one section, or collection of fragments, lights up another section. Conversely, no one fragment and no single section acquires its full potential for generating meaning, unless placed in relation with the larger whole” – Rollason „Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project“

Wittgenstein: “The best that I could ever write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. […] The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made.”

-- Philosophical Investigations, preface, 1945

Ted Nelson: I particularly minded having to take thoughts which were not intrinsically sequential and somehow put them in a row because print as it appears on the paper, or in handwriting, is sequential. There was always something wrong with that because you were trying to take these thoughts which had a structure, shall we say, a spatial structure all their own, and put them into linear form. --Interview with Jim Whitehead (1996)



Zibaldone Digital Research Platform: project objectives

(1) Implement the authorial analysis of the interrelations between textual fragments• activating the connections of the cross-references as hyperlinks• connecting the index themes to their corresponding textual references• group and visually represent the semantic fields of the text on the basis of:

-- the associations between textual units in the indexes and the cross-references-- keyword frequencies

(2) Reconstruct the text’s bibliographic networks• based on the quotes and bibliographic references• linking the URLs of their contents• database of authors with historical, geographic ids, genre

(3) Editorial apparatus(4) Expand the editorial apparatus via social modules

• user-generated tagging of the primary text• database of tagged secondary bibliography

(5) Create an interface with embedded tools which would allow users to explore the relational potential of encoded elements• statistical queries• visualizations



Bibliography

• Acanfora, Silviana. 1989-1994. “Indice e indicizzazione”, Zibaldone, ed. Peruzzi, p.90. • Amaral, Kimberly. “How to write for hypertext”• Cervato, Emanuela. “Lo Zibaldone come ipertesto: limiti e possibilità”. Atti del Convegno

internazionale, Barcellona 2012. Firenze: Olschki, 2013, pp.313-332. • Drucker, Johanna. 2014. Graphesis, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,. • Hebsgaard, Mark. 1994. “Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone and Hypertext”, Proceedings of the Seventh

International Congress of the Association for History and Computing, History and Multimedia, Bologna: Grafis, p.648.

• Leopardi, Giacomo. 2014. Signore ed Amico amatissimo. Lettere all’editore Stella. Kindle Edition. • Leopardi, Giacomo. 1991. Zibaldone di pensieri. Ed. Giuseppe Pacella. Garzanti, Milano. • Nelson, Ted. 1996. Interview with Jim Whitehead http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html• Prete, Antonio. 1980. Il pensiero poetante: saggio su Leopardi. Milano: Feltrinelli, p.70. • Riccini, Marco. 2000. Lo Zibaldone di pensieri: progettualità e organizzazione del testo, in Leopardi

e il libro nell'età romantica. Atti del Convegno internazionale di Birmingham (29-31 ottobre 1998), Eds.M. Caesar, F. D'Intino, Roma: Bulzoni, pp. 81-104.

• Rollason, Christopher. 2002. “The Passageways of Paris: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project and contemporary cultural debate in the West.” Modern Criticism, 292-96

• Standage, Tom. 1997. “Bill’s book and Leonardo’s hypertext” http://yoz.com/wired/3.02/iv/bill.html• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2003. Philosophical Investigations. Preface. Translated by Anscombe, G. Basil

Blackwell, Oxford, vii.



http://www.whoi.edu/science/B/people/kamaral/hypertext.html

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html

http://yoz.com/wired/3.02/iv/bill.html

Digital Scholarly Editing: definitions and methods

• visions for the digital scholarly edition/archive

• definitions of the digital scholarly edition

• the Digital Paradigm of scholarly editing

• typologies of digital editorial models

• methods of digital scholarly editing

• the Zibaldone as a digital research platform



Digital Humanities/Umanistica digitale

• Padre Roberto Busa Index Thomisticus (1949)

• ADHO Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

• AIUCD Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura

Digitale

• Intro to Digital Humanities Umanistica_Digitale

• ADHO publications, Frontiers in DH, Journal of TEI

• DH Training Network Digital Humanities Now

• Keywords: interdisciplinarity, collaboration, open access



http://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/

http://www.ilgiornale.it/news/e-gesuita-cre-link-merito-suo-se-navigate-internet.html

http://adho.org/

http://www.umanisticadigitale.it/

http://dh101.humanities.ucla.edu/

http://www.ibs.it/code/9788804637981/umanistica-digitale.html

http://adho.org/publications

http://journal.frontiersin.org/journal/digital-humanities

http://jtei.revues.org/

http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/ESU_C_T/node/409

http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/

Visions of digital scholarly editions: accessibility – relationality – engagement

• The potential to create an entirely new reading environment. An electronic edition [for Emily Dickinson] could be designed so that readers could explore multiple orders of the poems and choose between contrasting representations, as well as provide a library of secondary sources within the same reading space. (M. N. Smith 1998)

• Preserve and record multiple metanarratives (Voss and Werner 1999)

• Renaissance printers attempted to construct in print the relationality of what today are called hypertexts by devising layouts for the text with commentary and cross-references. But with books to establish the third, relational, dimension against their material two-dimensionality, has always been a rudimentary gesture... For editions existing electronically, in contrast, the relational dimension is a given of the medium, and complex relationalities may be encoded for them into the digital infrastructure itself. (Gabler 2010)

• The appeal of digital archives […] is that they are accessible anywhere, malleable, searchable, and capable of being analyzed and commented upon. (Shillingsburg 2013)

• The object continues to acquire meaning based on the users’ organization of the material, on its continuous re-mixing, re-using and re-presentation (Harris 2014)



Definitions of the digital scholarly edition (Hans Walter Gabler, 2016)

• relationally coordinated and the digital medium allows to model this relational structure.

not imitation of print editions

• open-ended and open to participation

not an end product

• interactive research/knowledge site

not a single authoritative editorial agency

*Preface to Digital Scholarly Editing, Theories and Practices, Driscoll & Pierazzo, Eds., 2016



The digital scholarly editing paradigm (Patrick Sahle, 2016, ibid.)

Traditional (print) edition

• Reconstruction of an Urtext,of original authorial intention

• Critical representation of historical documents: transcribing, annotating, describing, contextualizing a document

• One (authoritative) version of a text

Digital Edition

• Digitized/electronic text is NOT a digital edition

• Representation of potentially large number of documents in a potentially limitless number of different views, i.e. facsimile, diplomatic transcription, reading versions, etc.

• Guided by a digital paradigm



Typologies of digital editorial models(Elena Pierazzo, 2014)

• Phylogenetic: reconstruct text from the variants of several witnesses.

• Social and crowdsourcing: web 2.0 functions; distributed editorial agency; open to community participation – not passive reception, but also annotation, translation, transcription, editing, etc.

• Paradigmatic: separation of source and output, multi-dimensional:

- facsimile

- diplomatic

- semi-diplomatic

- reading



The digital scholarly editing paradigm (Patrick Sahle, ibid.)

• Digital facsimiles• Hypertext:

– modularized structure– multiple forms of reception – fluid boundaries between text and context

• Fluid publication– process rather than product– incremental development while exposed to public– team of editors and collaborators

• Pluralistic notion of text: visual, material, typographic, semantic, linguistic, etc.

• Single source principle technically



Paradigmatic editorial model(the Zibaldone)

– a source file (XML-TEI)

– a set of scripts (XSLT, XQuery)

– one or more outputs (HTML)

– a set of styling files (CSS)

Zibaldone: From multi-dimensional document representation to multi-dimensional content representation



Digital editions: methodology vs. practice (Joris van Zundert, 2016)

• The methodology is that of hypertext technology – fluid properties of text, process and context, intertextuality

• The practice is a rehearsal of the print paradigm of the codex

• TEI reinforces the representation of text as “document” rather than as “work”/”process”

Need for more methodological discussion between textual scholars and computer scientists

? The Zibaldone as meta-archive intrinsically demands relational representation. Its digital (re)mediation could produce a paradigm for taking advantage of the digital medium more effectively.



The Zibaldone: a digital research platform

• Sahle: “Editorial projects serve as platforms and portals featuring single works that are processed and annotated in depth and presented with particular functionalities.” (2016:34)

• piattaforma = basamento di appoggio o di manovra

• digital basis enabling to employ the tools to launch:

- comprehensive research on the text’s contents and structure

- the construction, mediation, and articulation of the semantic frameworks of the text

- collaborative and shared scholarship on the text



Leopardi’s perspective on editorial commentary: endnotes vs. footnotes

In reference to the editions of Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta and Trionfi

• “...nelle canzoni, dopo ciascuna strofa, si ponga quella tal parte dell’interpretazione che appartiene a quella tale strofa. Se le dame e i cavalieri saranno obbligati a voltare più d’una pagina per trovare la spiegazione del passo che avranno per le mani, tutta la facilità che abbiamo voluta procurar loro con questa interpretazione, sarà vanissima, perdutissima, inutilissima, svanirà interamente, e la sua edizione non avrà incontro maggior delle altre. In questo non mi rimetto a nessuno, e so di certo che non m’inganno.” –Giacomo Leopardi, 15 marzo, 1826. (Signore ed Amico amatissimo. Lettere all'editore Stella)

• “Bisogna pure assolutamente che i suoi compositori abbiano la pazienza di distribuire la interpretazione dei Trionfi appiè di ciascuna pagina, corrispondentemente al testo che vi sarà contenuto. Se la vorranno porre tutta insieme appiè di ciascun capitolo, i lettori avranno un incomodo e una difficoltà maledetta a trovare la spiegazione del passo che avranno per le mani; e la sua edizione è fatta a posta per appianare al possibile ogni difficoltà.” -- Giacomo Leopardi, 30 giugno 1826. (Signore ed Amico amatissimo. Lettere all'editore Stella).



Bibliography

• Gabler, Hans Walter, “Theorizing the Scholarly Digital Edition”, Literature Compass 7/2 (2010), pp.43-56.

• Harris, Katherine. “Archive”. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin Robinson, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

• Leopardi, Giacomo. Signore ed Amico amatissimo. Lettere all'editore Stella, POLLINE, Osanna 2014, Kindle.

• Nell Smith, Martha. "Corporealizations of Dickinson and Interpretive Machines“. The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture. Eds. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle. U of Michigan Press. (Spring 1998), pp.195-221.

• Pierazzo, Elena. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods. (pdf version 2014. <hal-01182162>) (hardcover: Routeldge Press, 2015).

• Sahle, Patrick. “What is a scholarly digital edition?”, Digital Scholarly Editing, Theories and Practices, Driscoll, Matthew & Pierazzo, Elena, Eds., 2016, pp.19-40.

• Shillingsburg, Peter. “Development principles for virtual archives and editions”, Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, 2013. http://ecommons.luc.edu/ctsdh_pubs/4/

• Voss, Paul and Werner, Marta. “Towards a poetics of the archive”, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol.32, No.1, pp. i-vii, 1999.

• van Zundert, Joris, “Barely beyond the book”, Digital Scholarly Editing, Theories and Practices, Driscoll, Matthew & Pierazzo, Elena, Eds., 2016, pp.83-106.


Platform, University of Macerata32

hal.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/hal-01182162/document

https://books.google.it/books?isbn=1783742410

http://ecommons.luc.edu/ctsdh_pubs/4/

Documents

Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone as a digital research